Welfare state begets family breakdown
By W. James Antle III
web posted May 6, 2002
President Bush's proposal to spend $300 million to encourage
marriage among those dependent on welfare highlights the
symbiotic relationship between the welfare state and family
breakdown.
One of the most important observations in David Frum's
excellent analysis of the modern American conservative
movement, Dead Right, focused on the futility of social
conservatives ignoring the expanding welfare state in favor of
efforts to preserve the family and traditional cultural mores. The
welfare state, by assuming functions typically belonging to the
family and therefore making aspects of family life economically
redundant, actually encourages family fragmentation. In a recent
National Review On-Line piece defending the president's
proposal, the writer Maggie Gallagher raised an equally
important corollary: The proliferation of broken families
encourages the growth of the welfare state by increasing the
demand for government social services.
It is not difficult to imagine why this is so. As Frum and others
have demonstrated, means-tested welfare programs provide
benefits to single mothers and their children and thus directly
subsidize the decision to have children outside of marriage. Even
popular programs tailored to the middle class, like Social
Security and Medicare, absolve family members of their
responsibility to one another and enable people to achieve a level
of economic security in retirement outside the context of their
families. It is also true that when families are not formed, people
must turn to government to provide the support they would have
otherwise received from their families. Women who have
children out of wedlock are much more likely to go on welfare
and be in an economically dependent position.
"To expect a nation of fragmented families to turn away from an
expanding welfare state is to expect a miracle," Gallagher wrote
in NRO. "The original social democrats of Europe saw this quite
clearly, which is why (especially in Sweden) they crafted social-
welfare proposals with an eye to deinstitutionalizing marriage,
making mothers less dependent on fathers but more dependent
on government."
Case in point is the post-Great Society collapse of the urban
black family. As the government assumed the economic role of
the father in many of these families, the number of fatherless
families increased dramatically. By the mid-1990s, the black out-
of-wedlock birth rate was 68 percent nationally and over 80
percent in some cities. Welfare dependency and family
breakdown complemented one another and indeed cyclically
encouraged one another.
The point isn't necessarily to defend the president's specific
marriage-based welfare reform policy. To a certain extent, the
welfare state is inherently anti-family and conservatives should
always be cautious of attempts to use it to promote the family or
for other conservative purposes. Conservative welfare
reformers, such as the Heritage Foundation's estimable Robert
Rector, will always be faced with this dilemma: Ultimately, just as
you cannot simultaneously insure that people who work always
are economically better off than people who do not while
maintaining an adequate economic existence for those who do
not work, you cannot simultaneously promote marriage and the
traditional family while subsidizing lifestyle choices outside of
those contexts.
But it is important to notice that the government programs that
we Americans like often act as obstacles to the type of family life
we claim we want to again have in this country. Similarly, the
resistance to traditional families evidenced by certain types of
people the late Murray Rothbard described as "modal
libertarians" creates economic circumstances that invite welfare
dependency.
Kate O'Beirne recently observed that 40 percent of American
girls will become pregnant at least once before their 20th
birthdays; 80 percent of teen mothers are unmarried and 75
percent will end up on welfare within five years. This in an
exponentially greater welfare participation rate than seen among
women who delay childbirth until they are older, more educated
and married.
Charles Murray has theorized that if it weren't for the welfare
state, it would be as difficult to have babies outside of marriage
as it was in 1960 and eventually it would be as rare. One of the
reasons that this seems such a radical solution is that we have so
many such families in existence now and their economic position
seems inexorably tied to the continued availability of welfare
benefits.
Frum noted in Dead Right that if capitalism emancipates the
individual appetite, welfarism makes it less risky to indulge in
some of the excesses of those appetites. If families do not house,
feed, clothe, educate and provide for children, the government
will be called upon to assume those roles. As families
disintegrate, government intervention becomes even greater. As
Gallagher pointed out in NRO, divorce involves the government
in decisions over who will have custody of children, for how long
and under what circumstances. We have in recent years seen
where these determinations have been made according to the
values of those making the decisions, with some on the right
denying custody to parents with nontraditional social mores and
some on the left denying custody to parents with politically
incorrect views or habits. In an era where activists decry a
parent's choice to smoke as "child abuse," it is easy to see failed
marriages and broken families creating opportunities for
unprecedented government intervention in our lives.
The indirect costs of family breakdown to taxpayers are equally
staggering. Children in broken or never-formed families are
consistently found to be much more likely to have behavioral
problems, use drugs, engage in crime, drop out of school and fail
economically. This translates into higher costs for dealing with
illiteracy, unskilled labor, crime control, drug and alcohol
treatment and welfare dependency.
The roadblock initiatives such as President Bush's run into is that
while there is a growing consensus about the importance of
marriage and families, especially to children, there is little
consensus as to what the implications of this view should be for
public policy. In fact, even steadfast supporters of the traditional
family are reluctant to use any public policy tool to advance their
objectives. But perhaps they need only to stop supporting
policies already in place that contribute to the loosening of family
ties.
Political correctness prevents even many social conservatives
from saying what needs to be said about the family: That if as
many people believe that it is the government's responsibility
rather than the family's to provide child care and other basic
parental roles as currently believe it is the government's
responsibility rather than the family's to educate children, there is
no way for society's most basic social unit to survive intact. But
the notion that strong families can indefinitely survive alongside a
large-scale cradle-to-grave welfare state that increasingly
assumes traditional family functions is an illusion. If "society" has
an obligation to children that is coequal with that of parents, then
look for bureaucrats to play a larger role in raising children.
Perhaps a paraphrase of the old bumper sticker slogan is in
order. The welfare state is not a family value.
W. James Antle III (wjantle@enterstageright.com) is a senior
writer for Enter Stage Right.
Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com